1. Field
The present invention relates generally to computer vision and, more specifically, to reducing the search space in object recognition or detection based on the current wireless environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Merchants often seek to entice consumers with offers, such as coupons, sales, rebates, favorable shipping terms, or other changes in terms favorable to consumers. Increasingly, such offers are available to consumers electronically, for instance, via the Internet. At the same time, many consumers now carry mobile computing devices, such as mobile phones and tablet computers while in stores of merchants at which the offers are redeemable. Yet many consumers fail to discover offers relevant to their current context, causing consumers to miss-out on valuable savings, merchants to miss-out on revenue, and publishers of offers to miss-out on revenue from offer redemptions.
These lost opportunities are believed to be caused, in part, by the difficulty of searching for offers on mobile computing devices. Text entry of queries is often inadequate. Mobile devices often include relatively small on-screen keyboards that make text entry of offer-search queries difficult. Existing image-based searches also suffer from limitations of some mobile devices. Some devices interface with remote systems to support voice or image-based queries, sending an image or audio to a remote system for a complete analysis, but these systems are often slow, unreliable (due to poor wireless connections), and consume valuable bandwidth, as data-intensive images and audio expressing queries are conveyed from the mobile device to remote image or voice recognition servers for classification prior to searching.